Fantasy Beyond History: Games as Method for Ecocritical Understandings of Time and Change

This paper argues that historical game studies (HGS) should draw on fantasy as a distinctive mode of engaging with time, rather than treating fantastic games merely as inaccurate historiography. Written as an extended abstract for the Proceedings of DiGRA 2025, it situates its inquiry within the Anthropocene, the condition in which human activity has become a geological force threatening societal survival, and within growing recognition that human experience of time is plural and nonsynchronous. The author contends that while HGS has expanded rapidly over the past decade, it has been slow to incorporate developments in historical theory and has tended to reproduce Eurocentric and anthropocentric assumptions inherited from academic history.

The paper identifies two concerns that ecocriticism raises and that HGS has inadequately addressed: the recognition of non-human agencies in historical processes, including animals, matter, and climate, and the challenge of reconciling everyday temporal experience with geological timescales that exceed human recording capacity. It notes that scholarly history, bound by empiricism, resists the speculative logic some game scholars advocate, and that treating fantasy simply as a testing ground for modern historical concepts risks marginalizing the genre's own engagement with myth. The author points to recent shifts such as a "heritage turn" and mythographic readings of games as partial correctives.

Methodologically, the paper is theoretical and conceptual rather than empirical, drawing on a wide range of secondary literature and illustrative game examples such as Legend of Mana and Slay the Princess. Its central claim is that heterochronia, the coexistence of multiple competing times, is pervasive in games through mechanics like save states, pausing, and fast-travel, so fantasy can serve as an interpretive method for in-game temporalities and for ecological perspectives that decenter human agency.